


Disciple

by coloredink



Category: Pet Shop of Horrors
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-03
Updated: 2009-03-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:49:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leon learns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disciple

They were, at least, used to American tourists in Beijing, even if occasionally someone stopped to take a picture of the tall, blonde man in the ripped jeans and frayed t-shirt. Leon tried not to be irritated. He had other things to worry about. There were no Chinatowns in the capital of China, and it didn't look like there was room here for the kind of pet shop D ran. Everything was skyscrapers and smog, and he was from Los Angeles, so he knew smog, and this was terrible. At least he knew how to use chopsticks, even if sometimes he had no idea what he was eating, or even if it was animal, mineral, or vegetable. Too bad he had no idea where to go next.

Then someone stopped him on the street. "You are American?" one of them asked him, excitedly, although it couldn't have been more obvious if Leon had an American flag hanging out of his back pocket. He had to tilt his head back; Leon was a head taller than even the men here. This one was an older guy, with a lot of gray in his hair, his face covered in folds and pocked with a youth full of bad skin. "Want to come teach English for me?" He handed Leon a business card.  
Turned out he worked for some adult school, teaching English, and they. . . apparently needed teachers.

Leon shook his head and handed the card back. "I can't teach."

"No problem." The man didn't move to take his card back. "All you need to do is talk. But we need more white teachers. They think Chinese people like me can't teach English, even though I lived in America for thirty years."

And suddenly, Leon had a job. He was pretty nervous at first, what with not having any teaching credientials whatsoever, and he probably wasn't supposed to teach them to swear, was he? Because that came with the Leon Orcot, Teacher package: copious swearing.

But as it turned out, he wasn't a teacher, he was a "conversation partner," and he got paid to speak English. Sweet. And he could talk to them about _anything_ , as long as it was in English, so he did. He talked to them about being a cop back in LA; about his little brother; about D, and how he used to visit D, and all the crazy pets D had in his shop, and how in the end he took off into the clouds, on a ship. Most of his conversation partners seemed to think this was a quaint fairytale made up by the American to test them--save for one old man who said "Ah!" and nodded, then frowned and started mumbling to himself.

Leon recognized that gesture by now as someone who was translating in his head, and he waited, even though his heart had suddenly kicked into high gear. The old man opened his mouth, then shut it again, then finally said haltingly, "In Hong Kong. . . I visit pet shop once."

"Yeah?" Leon said, trying to sound encouraging. He knew how to do this. He'd interrogated frightened witnesses and wary suspects before. He stilled his fingers; they wanted to fidget. Hong Kong! Why hadn't he thought of that?

The old man had a very thick accent, and he spoke with long, halting pauses between words, so that by the time he reached the end of a sentence, Leon had forgotten what the first part of it was. "Very small pet shop. . . very big inside. Very strange owner, look like woman. He dress in," he said something in Chinese that Leon took to be the name of D's dress things. "It is. . . old style dress. But he Chinese. He sell me bird that talk. He say good for old man."

Leon took a deep breath to steady himself. "Where in Hong Kong was it?"

\-----

The kid was pretty clearly stoned out of his brain, but not violent or anything. He staggered up to the bar with a couple of friends and drawled something in English that the bartenders obviously didn't understand, despite working in Amsterdam's red light district, where all sorts of tourists wanted all sorts of things and didn't always know how to ask for it in the local lingo. Leon sipped his beer and wondered if he'd be able to find a room for the night. In the background, the kid mimed turning a steering wheel, then an explosion. The bartenders looked alarmed.

"He wants an Irish Car Bomb," Leon explained, raising his voice over the hubbub. Both bartenders whipped their heads around. "Irish Car Bomb. You know, Guinness, Irish Cream, Jameson's. . . Christ, you _have_ Guinness here, don't you?" At the bartenders' continuing blank looks, Leon sighed, got up, and elbowed his way behind the bar.

Which was how he found himself with a job not too long after, and good thing too, because what happens when you sell all your worldly belongings except for what you can carry on your back and embark on a globe-trotting adventure is, 1. everyone thinks you're crazy, and they're right, and 2. at some point, you run out of money. But now Leon had a job mopping the floor and cleaning the toilets, translating for drunk and/or stoned American idiots, and sometimes they even let him behind the bar. He taught them how to mix Vulcan Mind Probes and Scooby Snax; they taught him how to speak Dutch. He got paid a little, under the table, but he got tips, too, from regulars that thought he was amusing and women that liked his muscles and his cop stories and his American accent.

"How did you come here?" one of them asked.

"I'm looking for someone," Leon said. "Chinese guy, about this tall, hair down to here, likes to wear dresses. Have you seen him?" They never had, which didn't surprise him; Amsterdam's Chinatown was the size of a postage stamp, and if there had been a pet store before, well, there wasn't one now. And it wasn't like D was easy to _miss_. But he asked anyway. A lot of tourists passed through Amsterdam, and maybe one of them had spotted D in another city.

But it was easy to let the days slide into weeks, and then the weeks built into months, and Leon was still there. He crawled into bed after the bar closed, around four or five in the morning, and stumbled out after noon. He joined the jostling, hollering, beer-drinking crowds for the Queen's birthday. He even went to the Van Gogh museum, though he didn't see what the big deal was about. He didn't look in the bottom of the top drawer next to his bed much, where Chris' drawing waited to remind him that he'd made a promise. His Dutch was good enough now that he could follow along with a conversation about sports, even if he couldn't contribute much; he'd never cared much about soccer, and he didn't know many of the players. But the regulars were impressed and pleased when he chimed in with the Dutch equivalent of "Yeah, but he was better last season," and one of them tipped him twenty euros. Leon whistled as he took out the garbage that night.

A rat froze in the patch of light from the open door. Leon froze too. The rat was the size of a small cat and bristled brown all over, with a long, narrow snout and a scarred back. It stared up at him and twitched its whiskers. Leon reached for a beer bottle to throw--then stopped. The rat snorted at him, and then there was just a long, naked tail whipping around a corner. Leon let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and finished taking out the garbage.

"I'm leaving," he told Arie, as soon as he got back inside.

"Tonight?" Arie asked, unruffled. He was a large man, even larger than Leon, with a scar above one eye that dented one of his eyelids, and lines on either side of his mouth. He'd never asked when Leon would leave, but also never asked if Leon planned to stay.

"Nah," Leon said. "Tomorrow, I guess, or next week."

Arie nodded. "Tomorrow is fine."

\-----

Conversations with Chris always started out the same. As soon as he got ahold of the phone, he yelled "Hey Leon how're you didja find D yet?" all in one breath, like the words would evaporate if they didn't trip off his tongue fast enough.

"Not yet," Leon said, and then distracted Chris with a funny story about an encounter with a taxi driver in Buenos Aires.

"There's a Chinatown there, right?" Chris asked.

"Little bro, if there's one thing I've learned on this trip, it's that there are Chinatowns everywhere."

Chris always wanted to know if Leon had seen any interesting animals. He thought Leon should go to the zoo and ask the animals if they'd seen D. Leon thought this was actually a pretty good idea and then realized he'd been on the road too long. But he told Chris he'd go check it out.

Chris was in third grade now and learning cursive. He'd memorized his times tables up to 9. He was worried about fractions. He had to do a project on his favorite animal, which he wasn't sure if it was dogs or tigers. Actually, he was pretty sure T-chan was his favorite animal, but he wasn't on the list the teacher had given them. He went kite-flying the other day and there were lots of dogs at the park. Kenny had a new pet bunny and the teacher let him bring it to school for show and tell. Chris had tried to talk to it, but it'd just wiggled its nose at him.

Some day, Leon thought, Chris was going to get a crush on a girl, go to his first school dance, learn to drive, someday even go to college. . . and where was Leon going to be? Leon had learned how to scavenge behind bakeries and grocery stores for food. He'd learned how to wash his clothes in a bathroom sink. He'd improved his Spanish, and he'd learned to speak a little bit of Dutch, Portuguese, French, and German. He'd missed Chris growing up. In his head, Chris was the same as he'd been at D's shop: half-full of baby fat, holding a raccoon by the paw.

"When you and D come back, we should all go to the zoo," Chris chattered. "And I wanna show D my new spelling test, I got an A and wrote it in cursive and everything! Do you think D would be proud of me?"

"Heck, _I'm_ sure proud of you," Leon said. "I'm sure D is, too."

\-----

The lions paced in a circle, nose to tail, shaking their large, shaggy heads in time with the drums, ears flopping and eyes rolling. At some unheard, unseen signal they reared up as one, front legs dangling for one breathtaking moment--and then they crashed back to earth and peered this way and that, mouths open, before resuming a faster, shuffling dance.

Leon wondered why they were called lions. They didn't look anything like the tawny, golden-eyed beasts at the Los Angeles Zoo. These lions were black and red and--look, that one over there even had green in its mane. Their heads were too wide and flat, their eyes too large, their flanks scaled instead of furred. Hadn't any of these people ever seen a lion?

And he heard, as clearly as if D had just purred in his ear, _Do you think many people in ancient China knew a lion, detective?_

Leon swallowed a yelp and tried not to shudder. He whirled in place, trying not to flail his arms into people. Nothing; just a bunch of Chinese people standing around in the Vancouver cold, watching the lions with all the attention and dedication of spectators at a Raiders game. Leon turned back to the lions, and his breath caught again, because now they _were_ lions. They were still crimson and ebony and violet, but now he could no longer see the sweating Chinese men under the costumes. Now they were _real_ , or as real as fantastic creatures could be. They prowled and strutted, rumbling deep inside their chests, glancing from side to side with half-open eyes. And then, abruptly, they stopped and stretched their forelegs before them, dropping into bows.

A pure white lion sailed into their midst, with a mane like sea foam and eyes like luminous pearls. Leon almost expected it to float several inches above the ground, or suddenly dissipate into mist. It went to each lion and touched its nose, exhaling a deep huff of breath into their nostrils. They stood, and the white lion joined in their dance, two steps forward and two steps back, four steps forward and four steps back, shaking their manes in a deep, hypnotic rhythm. They turned to face the center and repeated the movements, pressing so closely in the center that their manes tangled, and then someone at the edge of the crowd threw handfuls of--were those oranges?--into the ring.

The lions leapt up in a frenzy, like those oranges were raw steaks or antelope legs or something. Each lion caught an orange neatly in its mouth and peeled them with deft swipes of their claws. Each lion delicately ate the insides and then batted the rinds into the crowd, like kittens with toy mice. The crowd surged in, hands reaching, searching. If Leon had had his gun, he would have fired it. Were they crazy, or what? Didn't they know a lion when they saw one?

But the lions were men in costumes again, sweating even in the late January chill, grinning and laughing as the crowd swarmed them, grabbing for pieces of orange rind, or reaching out to touch the curly manes. They crushed Leon forward too, and he had to fight to get away. When he finally broke free, he walked to the end of the street before leaning against a wall to catch his breath. Then he froze and held it as the white lion marched by with slow, measured steps, close enough that its mane brushed against Leon's nose. The lion spared him one long look, then disappeared. Leon sneezed.

\-----

God, but Leon missed his car sometimes. Make that all the time, especially when he was standing in a downpour with his thumb stuck out, watching the red streaks of tail lights recede over his shoulder. You'd think a downpour would cause a driver to feel pity for his fellow man, but nooooo. . .

To Leon's immense surprise, one of the dark shapes that had been whizzing by all goddamn day began to slow. The passenger side door squeezed open. Leon ran forward with a glad exclamation of, "Oh thank God--" when something rolled out off the seat and into the mud. The door slammed shut and the driver clearly just stepped on it, because the car tore off and joined traffic with a chorus of squeals. Leon forcibly closed his jaw and went to see whatever it was that had squirted out of the car.

It was a kid. He looked like he was maybe sixteen years old, and this was the really cold part--he only had one arm. He was wearing a jacket, at least, but the right sleeve flapped uselessly at his side. Leon pulled the kid to his feet and thought about seeing if he could find something dry in his backpack for the kid to wear--but, well, it'd just get soaked again anyway.

"Thank you," the kid said through chattering teeth. "Thank you so very much."

"Hey, it's no problem--what the hell was that all about, anyway?" Leon tried to clear the rain from his eyes. The kid looked healthy, aside from the missing arm, although he had a pretty unmemorable face. Mousy hair, brown eyes--there was something in his face that always seemed worried, though, like he was thinking really hard about a difficult decision.

The kid sighed. "That was my aunt. My father got sick, and then he couldn't take care of me anymore. She was supposed to take me in, but she's got so many kids already, and. . . well. . ."

Leon was just about ready to choke on his rage. If he'd had his gun and his badge, he would've stormed that house with social services. Hell, skip the social services--Jill handled all that level-headed stuff. Leon was Mr. Action, Mr. Shoot First and Ask Questions later, Mr.--

But he didn't have his gun or his badge anymore.

Leon took a deep breath, held it for three seconds, then let it out. "That's seriously fucked up," he said.

The kid gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Tell me about it."

Leon stuck out his thumb again, though he didn't have much hope for _both_ of them getting picked up. Most drivers wouldn't pick up a single male hitchhiker, let alone two. But just a few minutes later, a battered 4x4 slowed. Leon took one look and almost blanched. The driver was an authentic crewcut-sporting, flannel-wearing, boot-stomping dyke, and her passenger was the same, only maybe she also hauled tree trunks for a living. She rolled down the window and yelled out, "Your dog can ride up front, but you're gonna have to ride in back."

"Huh?" Leon said, but the kid had already opened the passenger-side door and scrambled in on. . . all fours. Well, all three, because no matter where Leon looked, all he saw was a three-legged dog, with floppy brown ears and the most soulful brown eyes.

\-----

Leon spotted the cat while polishing off yet another glass of ice water. (The noodles hadn't _looked_ spicy; they'd looked like the kind of pan-fried noodles you could get at Sam Woo's, only with more seafood.) It was small, like all the cats he'd seen in Kuala Lumpur, maybe half the size of even the scrawniest alley cat back home. It stared at him, unblinking, with gray striped fur and the most luminous green eyes. The cats here were real feral cats, more like miniature wildcats than swaggering strays, wary but not fearful. Acting on a hunch--boy, _that_ had always worked out for him, right?--Leon fished a shrimp out of his noodles and dangled it close to the tile floor, at about the height of the cat's head.

"Hey," Leon said. "So this shrimp is probably a little spicy, but you're used to that, right? I'm just looking for information about this guy named D. Chinese, a little shorter than me, looks like a woman, wears a lot of dresses, runs a pet shop. Heard of him?"

The cat's ears turned toward Leon, and the eyes tracked the shrimp as Leon waved it around. Other than that, the cat made no move. Leon sighed and threw the shrimp toward the cat. The cat uncoiled and caught the shrimp in midair, then dropped it on the floor to eat properly, elbows tucked up by its sides. Leon turned back to his noodles and braced himself for another searing bite.

"The other patrons think you're crazy, you know."

Leon almost choked on a noodle. He pounded his chest, sucked down a gulp of water, and took a wheezing breath. "Christ!" He squinted at the speaker through watering eyes. Looked like a typical Malaysian dude: kinda short, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, albeit less conservatively dressed than most of them. While many Malaysians remained clothed from head to toe regardless of the humidity, this guy was bare-chested and wore nothing but a pale sarong tied around his waist. He was even barefooted. Leon took in the pointed ears and the unreal golden eyes and revised his mental estimation of who this person was.

"Never mind Bauk," said the man. He spoke with a very thick Malaysian accent, too, pinching off his vowels and often shuffling consonants out of the way as well. "She's a bit snobbish. Doesn't like people. You say you're looking for D?"

"Yeah." Leon was still trying to adjust to the fact that he was talking to. . . a cat? A dog? A monkey? A cat, probably, judging from those eyes. Then the cat's question sank in. "Yeah! Have you seen him?"

The cat-man carefully picked a cockle out of Leon's noodles, holding it with just the tips of his long, elegant fingernails, and ate in a manner that reminded Leon uncomfortably of D. "Not seen myself. I've only heard of D, never met him. But he was here. It was a great honor for Malaysia; we haven't hosted a D in. . . oh, must be nearly 50 years now."

"Wow," Leon said politely.

"Mmm." The cat-man batted the last shrimp off Leon's plate and ate that as well. "But in any case, he's moved on now. To. . . London, I believe he said."

Leon groaned. "London? I was just there!"

The cat-man looked quite smug. "I believe that's why he chose it."

\-----

"Mom and Dad think you should come home."

That was the first time Leon had heard Chris refer to his aunt and uncle as parents rather than surrogates. It startled him at first; he wanted to say, "But. . . Mom's dead." Then he realized Chris meant their aunt and uncle. It gave Leon a tight, awful feeling in his chest, but at the same time it was. . . sort of a relief. How old was Chris now? How many years had it taken for him to finally feel at home?

"I'm really close, Chris, I swear," he said.

Chris gave a small, crackling sigh. "They're really worried. Mom says you're gonna end up dead in a ditch."

"Well, they're wrong." Leon hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. "I'm going to find D and bring him back."

"Leon. . ." Then nothing. Leon bit his cheek against the impulse to babble into the silence. That was something he'd learned, too. "Leon, how're you gonna get D to come back?"

"I promised, didn't I? An Orcot never goes back on his word." The words sounded feeble even to Leon. What power were promises to a man whose only real desire was to see every human in the world dead beneath his feet? Leon had no excuses left; Chris was too old to believe in fairy tales of a Chinese man that kept dragons in his pet shop, in whose veins ran the blood of dead gods. Too old to believe that his brother held any kind of power over a man like that.

Chris sounded very small, suddenly. "Leon, I miss you."

Leon closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the partition. The guy in the cubicle next to him was gesturing wildly, his mouth open so wide that Leon could see his fillings, but these stalls were amazingly soundproof. "Yeah, I miss you too, little guy. And--and I bet D misses you, too. I bet he really wants to see you."

Chris didn't say anything.

"It'll be okay," Leon said. "Even if--it'll be okay."

\-----

The sign gave him a sick, lurching feeling in the pit of his stomach. It took Leon a moment to realize that the feeling was homesickness. The doors, the neatly scripted Open sign, even the little roof--Leon felt suddenly, embarrassingly, about to burst into tears. He bit his tongue, took a deep, shuddering breath, and raised one fist to pound on the door with what he hoped was his old, familiar authority.

Leon had a lot of questions for D. Just what are you, anyway? And what are all your animals? They're not really _animals_ , are they, like, the dogs and cats and fish I see every day? Are all animals like yours? Just how old are you? Why did you let me live--heal me, even? Why didn't you let me go with you? When D finally opened the door, though, looking the same as ever, all those questions fled Leon's mind. D didn't seem the least surprised to see Leon on his doorstep, but he didn't invite Leon in like he would have so many years ago. But then, Leon hadn't brought any cake.

He cleared his throat. "Y'know, I can speak Dutch now, a little bit. And a little bit of German, French, Spanish, Greek, and Japanese, too. But I never got the hang of Chinese. Well," he amended, "I can sort of ask for the bathroom without embarrassing myself."

D's ever-present smile widened into something slightly more real. "Ni hao, Detective--but you're not a Detective anymore, are you?" He looked Leon up and down. Leon wondered what he saw. He was in better shape than he'd ever been on the force, skin burned dark from sun, hair long and ragged at the ends where he'd been cutting it with a pocketknife. He was suddenly very aware that he needed to shave, and that he probably stank. But D only smiled more, as if he liked what he saw.

Leon found that there was only one question he wanted to ask, after all. "Are humans--have humans earned the right to board your ship yet?"

D's smile became more reserved, and Leon quelled the nervousness that rose up in his throat by thinking about the birds he'd seen in Africa. "Humans? No, not yet." He reached out one long-nailed hand and brushed just the tips of his fingers against Leon's chest. "But you, maybe."


End file.
